A former lab director once advised me to always  have multiple papers in the pipeline. What he   meant was that if I wanted to be productive,  I needed to always have several research   papers at various stages of completion,  submission, and publication. At the time,   I didn't pay much attention to this  advice thinking that I needed to put   all my energy toward getting one paper published  before starting on the next one. Hi I'm Karen McKee   and I thought today I would talk a bit  about how to get more papers out the door.   When I was a student, everyone seemed to follow a  set workflow. Conduct the study. Analyze the data. Write the   paper. Submit for publication. Keep fingers  crossed and hope for a positive response.   Later as I began working as a research  scientist, this approach seemed to be the   way many of my colleagues worked, that is except  for those who were highly productive, publishing   several papers per year. And I'm talking about  good papers published in peer-reviewed journals. These authors, like my lab director, always had  several papers in the pipeline. How did they do it?  First of all, they started writing early in each  project and continued writing as things progressed.   For example, they might begin  writing the introduction and methods   at the start of a project and then the results  as experiments are completed and the data come in.  When they get stuck on one paper, they switch  to another paper and work on it for a while.    So that at any point in time there are several  papers in preparation, some in submission,   and others in revision. Productive authors have  a good system for keeping track of manuscript   versions and other materials such as figures and  tables, journal reviews, and other correspondence.   Everything is kept in electronic  folders and backed up somewhere.   Another important attribute of productive  colleagues is that they seek collaborators,   which increases the total number of potential  papers. This way, the writing burden can be   shared with co-authors.

For example, three  researchers might plan for three papers   from a joint project, but each one takes the  lead on one of the papers. The result would be   three publications for each collaborator,  but the writing burden was evenly shared.   Productive authors don't procrastinate. They set  deadlines for themselves and co-authors for a   first draft, for revisions, or to finalize journal  submission materials. They also spend time talking   to co-authors about the direction of a paper,  which helps them stay motivated. Productive authors   keep abreast of the literature throughout the  process continually running literature searches   on the topic of the paper in preparation. This  way, an author can be certain that the information   in the paper reflects the most recent literature  and be confident in moving forward to submission.   They also make use of reference  manager software such as Endnote,   which saves time in formatting or reformatting  references and helps avoid errors in citations.  For example, if a paper is rejected, citations  can be reformatted for another journal   with a single click avoiding having to  edit each entry by hand. Productive authors follow   up with co-authors who are tardy in providing  their contributions to a manuscript. As lead   author, they keep co-authors apprised of progress  in writing, submitting, and revising manuscripts.   Finally, they don't hesitate to contact editors  when they fail to hear from the journal after a   reasonable amount of time. Using the pipeline  process can help you be more productive. Of   course, the number of papers you publish per year  will vary over time as your projects wax and wane.  The point is to keep things moving through the  pipeline and not put off dealing with blockages.   Thanks for watching, and please like my video and  subscribe if you found this information useful.